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The Newsdesk

Although short, Turing’s time at NPL was instrumental to the design and eventual construction of the ACE computer, the first universal computer of its kind. His knowledge of his own abstract machines, the plans for the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) and likely also Colossus (the computer used at Bletchley Park) was enough to convince him that his machine could be built and would work, despite there being no functional computers based on a similar model at the time.

Despite the setbacks, from lack of staff, technical expertise and funding, and despite Turing himself leaving NPL for good in 1948, the Pilot ACE was eventually built and demonstrated to the public and press in late 1950. This led to the development of DEUCE (the commercial version of the Pilot ACE) and finally ACE, the full-scale Automatic Computing Engine, in 1958.